Methodology example in thesis

The aggregate gap on the overall distance to frontier of the indicator set is used to assess the impact of data changes. Any data update that leads to a change of two or more percentage points on the relative distance to frontier gap is classified as a reform (for more details on the relative gap see the chapter on the distance to frontier and ease of doing business ranking). For example if the implementation of a new one-stop shop for company registration reduces time and procedures in a way that the overall relative gap decreases by two percentage points or more, the change is classified as a reform. On the contrary, minor fee updates or other small changes in the indicators that have an aggregate impact of less than two percentage points on the relative gap are not classified as a reform, but their impact is still reflected in the most updated indicators for this indicator set.

Bad naming practices . University managers are still fighting for convincing their authors to assign the correct affiliations in the scientific publications. Situation is not far better in the Web with several hundred institutions having more than one central webdomain, preserving active old domains, using alternative domains for international (English) contents or sharing domains with third parties. Even among those universities with only one domain, many of them change the domain frequently, sometimes without any apparent good reason for doing that. A strange relatively common situation is when those changes are for transferring a national top level domain to an “.edu” domain (that usually refers to a USA university!) even when the country has a clearly defined academic subdomain (, , ). These changes and, especially the preservation along the time of several domains, penalizes very severely in Webometrics ranking. But of course it is also a very misleading practice that decreases the web visibility of the universities. Probably it has not so strong effect on local populations, but it is really confusing for the global audiences.